Intrigo

by Håkan Nesser

  Cannot keep them there on

  every word.

  This is the last page,

  this is

  the last

  moment

  of your life.

  Raise your eyes, Agnes.

  Look at me

  now.

  THE FLOWER FROM SAMARIA

  Translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlen

  Adapted into the film Samaria

  1

  It wasn’t me who got the whole thing started. Who dug up the Snake Flower again. I just want that said. In no way was that my object or intent; life is so full of alarming and cruel happenings that it’s bad enough to have to stand by and watch.

  I know what I’m talking about. During my forty-nine years here on earth I haven’t made more than four or five important decisions, but each time I’ve done so they’ve had the most unforeseen consequences. As a result I’ve learnt to abstain. Over the years I’ve increasingly understood to avoid the sorts of things that in any way can jeopardize the balance and stability in existence, my own and others’.

  Don’t get me wrong. Certain people can commit the most astounding stupidities and still land feet first. For my part, all that was needed to find myself with a twenty-five-year marriage and two daughters around my neck was a little wink of the eye. For example.

  I live in Grothenburg. The wife and daughters do too, although we are no longer under the same roof. Hilde and Beatrice are two and a half years apart in age, but there was only five months between their weddings. Both events took place in the winter just passed and Hilde, and quite possibly the other one too, is pregnant. I still have one year left until my fiftieth birthday, yet I’m well on my way to becoming a grandfather.

  My wife’s name is Clara and she no longer loves me. She announced this quite recently, just four days before the summer holidays started, and that was the real starting point. Yes, in a way it was actually Clara who got the ball rolling. I wash my hands, I always do that when the opportunity offers itself.

  Yes, and not without reason.

  Perhaps she never loved me at all and when I winked at her that evening by the Aegean Sea in 1972, my head was full of this, that and the other, but hardly full of love.

  That absolute flame has only burnt in me a single time. It was thirty years ago now, but that time I truly acted based on my passion and what I’m now going to recount is about the consequences of that.

  About the consequences and about their peculiar, late-occurring interplay with my wife’s announcement on that particular warm, promising evening in June of 1997. The announcement that she no longer loved me.

  I lowered the newspaper and sat quietly a moment. Clara kept pottering with the tomato plants, as if she hadn’t said what she’d said at all. For a moment I got the idea that it had only been an illusion, that I’d heard wrong.

  ‘Do you want a divorce?’ I asked anyway.

  ‘I think I do,’ she said without looking up. ‘I’d like to have the summer to myself anyway.’

  ‘Have you met someone else?’ I asked.

  ‘In a way,’ she said.

  I thought that was an unusually dubious answer, even coming from my wife. Thought for a while about who the guy could be, but soon found I didn’t really care and continued on with the newspaper instead.

  Less than two hours after this conversation Urban Kleerwot called. It may seem peculiar that this happened on the same evening that my quarter-century-long marriage came to an end, but as I’ve tried to explain: this is the way it goes – and has gone – in my life. Events are simply drawn to events, a kind of psychic magnetism that I don’t really know how to relate to or explain. Consequently I keep from trying.

  ‘Henry Maartens?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hi there. Urban Kleerwot here. Do you remember me?’

  I thought about it and said that I remembered.

  ‘Long time.’

  ‘It wasn’t yesterday.’

  ‘Thirty years to be exact.’

  He laughed. I didn’t recognize his voice, but I recognized his laugh. It had been a force of nature during our high school years and seemed to have been refined with the years and the kilos.

  I hadn’t yet seen Urban of course, but if there is anything that is unable to conceal a considerable weight gain, it’s a laugh.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Doing OK,’ I answered. ‘Getting a divorce, I think, but I shouldn’t complain.’

  ‘Oh, boy,’ he said. ‘So you’ve been married?’

  ‘You hit the nail on the head. Haven’t you?’

  ‘Haven’t had time.’

  ‘I see. What do you want?’

  He faked a cough before he got to the point.

  ‘You work as a language teacher?’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘Max. You’d seen each other, he said.’

  I thought about it and recalled that I had run into Max Sterner at a book fair a year or so ago.

  ‘And?’

  ‘I need a little help. You were some kind of linguistic genius back then and it can’t very well have gone away completely, right?

  I didn’t answer. This was starting to smell like work.

  ‘What kind of work do you do yourself?’ I asked.

  ‘Psychotherapy,’ said Urban. ‘But forget about that. The thing is, I’ve written a book. A real winner, to be honest, although I need someone to look through it. Grammatically and such.’

  I didn’t doubt that at all.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘Aarlach. But I still have a cabin outside K–. Completely isolated out by the lake. Thought about asking if we couldn’t spend a couple of weeks down there this summer. I’ll take care of the food and lodging. You read and make corrections. We’ll talk about old times. A glass of cognac and a cigar. Fish a little. Are you in?’

  I thought for two seconds.

  ‘When?’ I said.

  ‘The sooner, the better. I can be there as of the tenth, just have to finish up some work first. What do you say?’

  I looked at my calendar. It was as open as can be.

  ‘Two weeks starting the eleventh,’ I said. ‘Those are the only weeks I’m off.’

  ‘Excellent,’ said Urban Kleerwot, laughing again. ‘In just seven days. Well, I’ll be damned, it’s going to be fun. You haven’t been to K– that often since we graduated?’

  ‘Not one time.’

  ‘What the hell are you saying? You haven’t set foot there in thirty years? Why is that?’

  ‘There are reasons,’ I explained.

  ‘You mean . . . that thing that happened?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Urban continued after a while. ‘It is what it is. Maybe we can talk about that too.’

  We exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, then we hung up. I sat there a good while in the study and thought. Felt how time, those three decades – more than half of my life – seemed to shrink together into just about nothing.

  What is life really? I thought. What becomes of all these days?

  Then I went and made up the bed in the guest room without saying goodnight to my wife. It was several hours before I could fall asleep, and what then pursued me in the world of dreams was by no means thoughts of Clara and our soon to be separated ways, but instead what it would mean to re-establish acquaintance for the first time with K– and with the paths I wandered in my late teens. The high school years.

  It felt generally disquieting and I understood that under no circumstances would I have said yes to Urban Kleerwot’s proposal if it hadn’t been for my wife’s surprising move earlier in the evening. That she no longer wanted to be with me.

  So it wasn’t me who dug up the Snake Flower. Might just as well underscore that one more time.

  2

  When I set off early on Saturday morning – the day after sc
hool broke up for summer – my wife was not awake yet.

  At least that was the impression I got, but it’s possible of course that she was only pretending to sleep to avoid any sort of uncomfortable farewell scene. We had come to an agreement not to discuss the situation until August. After twenty-five years of marriage between two language teachers it’s still not words that will save you. I had told her that I intended to go away, but that was all. Would presumably be back for Midsummer; she said that suited her just fine, because she herself had a trip booked for the twenty-fourth.

  Were we to cross paths, it wouldn’t need to be for more than a day or two.

  I had packed the evening before. A soft suitcase with a few changes of clothes, a half-dozen books and an old baitcasting rod that was presumably both antiquated and useless. I thought it showed a little goodwill anyway.

  Because the meeting with Urban Kleerwot was not set until Monday, and I really wanted to get away from Grothenburg as soon as possible, I had called and booked a room at Hotel Continental in K– for two nights. It was the only hotel I could recall from the sixties, and when I contacted directory enquiries it turned out that it was still there under the same name. I remembered Continental as a rather imposing fin-de-siècle building across from the railway station; I’d had dinner twice in its dining room, both times in the company of my parents and my brother, and both times with a sense of finding myself in a different kind of world. Not necessarily a better or finer world than the usual, just different. Parallel.

  Whether the Continental would make the same impression on me thirty years later was of course an open question as I wended my way towards K– that beautiful June morning. We’d had a late spring in our part of the country, bird cherry and lilac were both still in bloom and the open landscape that spread out on either side of the road still had some of the delicate greenery of innocence. No saturation, no heavy sweetness, just the promise.

  I was not primarily focused, however, on experiences of nature as I sat behind the wheel and cruised southward. Of course not. I thought about K–. About the Charles Church. About the Mefisto restaurant. About the river with all the bridges. About Doggers Preparatory Academy and my years of high school – which should have been three, but which had had an undesired extension thanks to the unmistakable pitfalls of that era: freedom, revolution, pop music, general immaturity and the smoky existentialist cafe the Grubby Bun.

  Four years instead of three. I was fifteen when we moved to K–, I was nineteen when I left. My father took the position as acting postmaster on 1 August 1963; it wasn’t the first time we came to a new place, but this time it was intended to be permanent. K– was going to be our city, my parents’, mine and my brother’s. Georg was six going on seven when we arrived, but was still wetting the bed. My mother thought it had something to do with all the moves. And the moves had to do with my father’s career. His postal promotions.

  Even if you’re in the postal service you don’t have to be passed around like a bundle of second-class mail, my uncle Arnt put it, adding to the criticism.

  But K– would be enough, that was the thought. The postmaster function was sufficiently grand, my father strove no higher.

  So it surely would have come to be – all signs pointed in that direction those optimistic years in the mid-sixties. But suddenly, and against all odds, the regular postmaster, Strunke, recovered from his alcohol-related liver disease, and in August of 1966 it was time to pack again.

  That was when I refused. The year before, when I had regained my aptitude for studies, there was only one year left until graduation, and for good reasons jumping into a new third-year group in a new city felt both unreasonable and simply annoying. I think it was the first important decision of my eighteen-year-old life. It was somewhat trying, but at last my parents gave in. First my mother and three hours later my father too.

  I got a rented room.

  The woman’s name was Kuntze and she was the widow of a butcher who’d died from a blood clot. The house behind the athletic field down on Pampas had become a little too costly, for that reason she rented out spare bedrooms.

  I got a room under the eaves with a view of an old apple tree, a spruce hedge and the very top portion of the brick-red preparatory school roof. If I had the window open and was waking up, I could hear the first bell from bed and still be in school no more than four minutes later. It was kind of ideal.

  In the other room lived Kellermann, an introverted optician’s assistant, thirty-something and ninety-something. Kilos, that is. He had no social life, busied himself with philately and chess by mail. We shared a toilet and bathroom, but that was all.

  The widow Kuntze herself had two malicious cats, a Slingbolt brand hearing aid, and a lover by the name of Finckelstroh. He usually arrived one Saturday a month on a black motorcycle, stayed half the night and was always mysteriously gone on Sunday mornings.

  Otherwise I didn’t bother much with any of those in my physical vicinity, be it Kuntze, Finckelstroh, Kellermann or the cats. I was in the final stage of my teens, in my last year at Doggers, and naturally had more noble interests.

  Such as pop music. Such as politics and poetry and philosophical issues. From whence and where to? Hellhound on my trail.

  Such as girls. It was 1966 and skirts were starting to get short. It wasn’t easy to be young, pimply and peach-fuzzed, truly not easy. Desire, unbridled and unsatisfied, climbed in tempo with uncertainty and awkwardness. In my language class at Doggers the gender distribution was uneven: twenty-three girls and twelve boys. In round numbers, two ladies per man, but what did that help?

  No doubt one or two of the peach-fuzzed ones had started to taste the forbidden fruit, but for the majority of us all such things were still the stuff of fantasy. True enough, in the select company with whom I usually associated – Niels Bühltoft, Urban Kleerwot and Pieter Vogel – the conditions of art, the Communist manifesto, the situation in Cuba and deontological ethics were discussed, but about how you actually might get on with a woman, we knew nothing. Not a thing.

  Perhaps it was in the nature of a small town, a small town just as prudish as its high school students. When my last term started I’d been in love with half a dozen girls from the class, I had held hands with three of them and I had kissed one. Her name was Marieke and she had a passable right hook that made me sober up at once.

  That’s the way it was. Woman was a mystery. Despite the spirit of the times. Despite pop music. Despite the existential questions. I can’t get no satisfaction.

  It was a gorgeous day, this year’s first summer Saturday, and I took my time. Indulged myself in a couple of hours rest at midday by one of the lakes outside Wimlingen, and it wasn’t until almost seven o’clock in the evening that I cruised in through the old, well-preserved East City Gate in K–.

  I felt at once that I was lowered into the well of time.

  Thirty years? I thought. Was it truly possible that thirty years had passed since the last time I saw these narrow, pastel-coloured houses along the old shopping street? Wasn’t it yesterday – or last week at least – that I stood and observed the quietly purling water from the familiar bronze figures of the fountain on the cobblestone square? And, in reality, weren’t those young girls who sat having ice cream on one of the benches in front of city hall a couple of my contemporary classmates?

  A glance in the rear-view mirror made me return to the tundra of reality. The year was 1997. I was forty-nine years old; true, I’d lost the pimples, but acquired liver spots, wrinkles and bags under my eyes in return. Elephant skin on my neck. C’est la vie, I thought, and I drove on through the tunnel to get on the right side of the railway tracks. Ou peut-être la mort. There’s a time and a place for everything. Young girls in the square, travel-weary middle-aged folks at the Continental.

  The girl in reception was red-haired and had a ponytail. She smiled with a full set of flawless teeth, gave me the key to room number 39 and informed me that the dining room served dinner until ele
ven o’clock.

  Because it was Saturday. If I wanted to wash the travel dust off myself first.

  I understood that I reeked of sweat. Quickly said thank you without revealing my breath. Took my bag and hurried over to the lift. Ten minutes later I was standing in the shower, wondering why in the world I travelled back to this hole two days sooner than I needed to.

  It was a question I would have reason to come back to.

  I had dinner at the hotel – Saltimbocca alla Romana, to be exact – that first evening. Briefly considered plans for a walk through the city before night too, but two glasses of heavy wine teamed up with my accumulated fatigue and sent me straight to bed. I heard the bells in Charles Church strike quarter past eleven through my open window, but I do not recall the half hour stroke.

  Evidently I had ordered breakfast in my room, because I was wakened at nine o’clock on Sunday by the redhead, who came in with a well-loaded tray and a morning paper. She showed all her teeth again in what resembled a conspiratorial smile, and for a moment I had the feeling that she had something on her mind.

  I was too sleepy, however, to get any conversation started and she left me without any comments other than to wish me bon appétit and a pleasant day.

  After breakfast and a shower I took possession of the city. K–. Wandered around the old city centre, which felt strangely unchanged since the sixties. Krantze’s bookshop was still in the same location; the pharmacy, the police station, Grote Square with all the pigeons . . . everything seemed to be there, exactly where it had always been and was always going to be. The Grubby Bun, the existentialist cafe, was just a memory however; the whole block had been razed, now it was glass and concrete and postmodernism that prevailed. Boutiques and shops.

  And Doggers. This Gothic colossus of knowledge. Pinnacles and towers. Steeply sloping roofs. Jackdaws and black brooding windows; I had slight palpitations.

  The Pampas residential area – on the other side of the river seen from Doggers – was also fairly intact, rows upon rows of old wooden and brick houses with moss-grown lawns, fruit trees and lilac hedges. My old apple tree was blooming so opulently it seemed to be almost singing in tune with the sunshine, and I noticed how I got a lump in my throat while I stood outside on the pavement and stared up at the attic window with the red-checked curtains.